King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

in the smoky lamplight. There were ten men who held lamps for him, one of them a newcomer, and it was he who spoke.

“Fighting in the Khyber! Aye! We were a little lashkar, but we drove them back into their fort! Aye! we slew many!”

“Not a jihad yet?” King asked, as if the world might be coming to an end. The words were startled out of him. Under other circumstances he would never have asked that question so directly; but he had lost reckoning of everything but these poor devils' dreadful need of doctoring, and he was like a man roused out of a dream. If a holy war had been proclaimed already, then he was engaged on a forlorn hope. But the man laughed at him.

“Nay, not yet. Bull-with-a-beard holds back yet. This was a little fight. The jihad shall come later!”

“And who is 'Bull-with-a-beard'?” King wondered; but he did not ask that question because his wits were awake again. It pays not to be in too much of a hurry to know things in the “Hills.”

As it happened, he asked no more questions, for there came a shout at the cave entrance whose purport he did not catch, and within five minutes after that, without a word of explanation, the cave was left empty of all except his own five men. They carried away the men too sick to walk and vanished, snatching the last man away almost before King's fingers had finished tying the bandage on his wound.

“Why is that?” he asked Ismail. “Why did they go? Who shouted?”

“It is night,” Ismail answered. “It was time.”

King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aid of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him; his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet.

“But who shouted?”

“Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who obey,” said Ismail.

“Whose men were the last ones?” King asked him, trying a new line.

“Bull-with-a-beard's.”

“And whose man art thou, Ismail?”

The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the same assurance in his voice as once there had been.

“I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toil tomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan.”

King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless. For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; for another, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion that they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat indignantly. Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely distinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both nerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve King had, but his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care.

He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his head had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of Yasmini all night long.

It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the faded photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the cave became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first wooed his senses in her reception room in Delhi.

He dreamed that she called him by name. First, “King sahib!” Then, “Kurram Khan!” And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are strange things.

“He sleeps!” said the same voice presently. “It is good that he sleeps!” And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer.

After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep, although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was a dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself.

But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to become two women in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed at both and called them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drew a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt.

Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a dead man, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was not very far away, and that she was interested in him to a point that was actually embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a hospital.

When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the passage into his cave.

“Ismail!” he shouted, for he was thirsty. But there was no answer.

“Darya Khan!”

Again there was no answer. He called each of the other men by name with the same result.

He got up and realized then for the first time that he had not undressed himself the night before. His head felt heavy, and although he did not believe he had been drugged, there was a scent he half-recognized that permeated the cave, and even overcame the dreadful atmosphere that the sick of yesterday had left behind. He decided to go to the cave mouth, summon his men, who were no doubt sleeping as he had done, sniff the fresh air outside and come back to try the scent again; he would know then whether his nose were deceiving him.

But there was no Ismail near the entrance--no Darya Khan--nor any of the other men. The horse was gone. So was the mule. So was the harness, and everything he had, except the drugs and instruments and the presents the sick had given him; he had noticed all those still lying about in confusion when he woke.

“Ismail!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, thinking they might all be outside.

He heard a man hawk and spit, close to the entrance, and went out to see. A man whom he had never seen before leaned on a magazine rifle and eyed him as a tiger eyes its prey.

“No farther!” he growled, bringing his rifle to the port.

“Why not?” King asked him.

“Allah! When a camel dies in the Khyber do the kites ask why? Go in!”

He thought then of Yasmini's bracelet, that always gained him at least civility from every man who saw it. He held up his left wrist and knew that instant why it felt uncomfortable. The bracelet has disappeared!

He turned back into the cave to hunt for it, and the strange scent greeted him again. In spite of the surrounding stench of drugs and filthy wounds, there was no mistaking it. If it had been her special scent in Delhi, as